The Incredible Freedom of Not Trying to Look Good - The Atlantic

No one explicitly told me that long hair was beautiful, but even as a child, I knew it was. My Barbies had it. Disney princesses had it. The American Girl dolls I coveted had it. So I had it too, even though it was a literal pain. “One must suffer to be beautiful,” my dad would quip when I yelped and jerked away from my mother pulling a comb through my always-tangled hair. Cutting it short would have been more practical. But I wanted to be beautiful—of course I did.<br>Humans learn early what is attractive, and some people spend their life trying to achieve that standard. They watch as, in pursuit of a strong jawline and social-media fame, one young man repeatedly taps his face with a hammer, or as an already thin celebrity goes on a crash diet in order to fit into a famous dead woman’s dress for a few minutes. Americans pay for makeup and hair removal, blowouts and manicures, personal trainers and facials, botulinum toxins injected into muscles and synthetic hyaluronic acid to plump lips—collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to achieve the look they want, or at least the look they think they should have.<br>This isn’t driven just by vanity: According to research, aesthetically pleasing people are generally more economically successful, and appearance-based discrimination incurs measurable economic costs. Beauty is historically tangled up with notions of morality, cleanliness, and fitness to lead. Being beautiful opens doors socially, too; a person’s actual qualities and abilities may be bolstered by what psychologists call an “attractiveness halo” effect, and such treatment can lead to beautiful people having a more optimistic outlook on life.<br>Good looks and their benefits are widely known and openly discussed, but there’s far less talk about the experience of not being attractive. In 2022, the philosopher Thomas J. Spiegel wrote about the uncomfortable reality that discrimination based on looks is a kind of injustice, one with both psychological and material consequences. The writer Stephanie Fairyington has been thinking about Spiegel’s work, and the concept of attractiveness, for a long time. What, and who, is it all supposed to be for, anyway? What is it meant to achieve<br>Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter<br>By Fairyington, Stephanie

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In her new book, Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter, Fairyington investigates why physical beauty—as defined by subjective standards that have shifted over time and still vary widely among cultures and generations—is so highly valued. And she begins it by admitting that she is ugly. Not “in a way that would elicit mouth-gaping stares,” she clarifies; she’s just “bland, offensively so, like a person who’s given up or doesn’t try.” But even hinting at this fact without self-deprecation upsets people around her, especially women, who “can’t let a thought like that hang in the air.” Accepting and naming ugliness is sacrilegious, “very nearly the worst thought to think of oneself,” she writes. Not everyone can be conventionally beautiful, of course, but these reactions imply that the real sin is to leave one’s looks alone rather than taking advantage of all of the available interventions—all of the ways a person can fix themselves.<br>Read: Reclaim imperfect faces<br>What is a self-proclaimed ugly woman to do? And, more urgent, how is Fairyington to raise her traditionally good-looking tween daughter in a world that will teach her to value, nurture, and improve those looks at the cost of pursuing other desires? Ugly, which is addressed to an older, future version of her child, is dedicated to trying to answer that question. The book is both a philosophical text and a mother’s lament as she tries to imagine a new world in which physical beauty is no longer something worth focusing on.<br>Fairyington is not naive enough to think we can simply ignore looks. Human beings are social creatures, and so of course we understand ourselves in relation to others. It makes sense that among a group of friends, say, we might recognize who is shorter and who is taller, who is thinner and who is fatter, just as we would acknowledge that some of us enjoy opera while others prefer video games. The trouble, she points out, is that most people don’t perceive these facts to be just interesting variations; instead, they’re evaluative, tied to dichotomies such as good or bad, hot or not. She’s also not saying that we should be challenging beauty norms only by brazenly celebrating what is considered ugly as beautiful. She does explore that resistance through figures such as the English musician Poly Styrene and the drag queen Fauxnique, and she acknowledges the creative, playful, powerful effects of emphasizing features that we’re taught to downplay. But embracing a spectacle of ugliness can be just as labor intensive as chasing unattainable ideals of beauty—and can affirm what is considered attractive.<br>The author vividly remembers...